as some of you may have guessed by now, my day job does not (sadly) consist of knitting. by day, i'm a web coder/programmer for a large media/entertainment company in midtown manhattan. i basically spend all day sitting in front of a computer making websites or going to meetings and making decisions on how those websites are designed and should perform. it's a rewarding job and at the end of my day i have a website i can point to and say "i built that." i've recently hit a very tiny amount of downtime at work so i'm spending my days learning ruby (and ruby on rails) and conjuring up all types of code for gleek.net and for my friends' sites. it's the kind of downtime i really enjoy because i feel like i'm really accomplishing something instead of sitting around and staring at the walls (which is equally nice every once in a while but not every day for two weeks..)

recently, i became really annoyed with something.. you see, i have this great piece of software installed on firefox called adblock. it stops all of those annoying flash ads and image ads from showing up on websites. really, it's quite fantastic and i highly recommend installing it. it takes a bit of time to customize it but after a while, you don't notice the blank spaces on websites where ads are supposed to be. brilliant!

i digress..

anyway, so adblock puts these little tabs on top of flash files on sites so that you can easily *click* and hide away the pesky little things. the tabs, though, are annoying when they're applied to totally legitimate flash elements of a page. where i notice them the most is on knitblogs that use that handy little progress bar for keeping readers up-to-date on the status of a project (40% done, 60%, 100% etc.) what knitbloggers may not know is that not all browsers come with flash, especially if people are using their sidekick or mobile device to access your site, so they don't see them. that gave me an idea! "i'll use PHP to dynamically create progress bar images!"

and here you have it:

GLEEK.NET DYNAMIC PROGRESS BAR IMAGE v1.0

here are a few examples:

if you host your own blog or have the ability to upload files to your blog, this will probably work for you. your blog must be hosted on a server that runs PHP and has the GD library installed. i've included a test file in this zip that you can upload and find out if your server is capable or not. as for the progress bar itself, you can specify the colors (background, bar color, and text color) but the image size is set to 120 pixels wide by 20 pixels tall. all the information that you'll need to use this is in the README file.

i'm using the progress bars on my projects in progress [backpack] page ETA: i am currently not using these anywhere on the website except here on this entry since i became such a ravelry addict. if you want to take a look! i love them, of course. the outputted GIF file is much easier to manipulate than an SWF file. i can apply styles to it (put a border around the bar) and/or link it to another page because it's just an image!

download and enjoy! if you use it, please link to me and tell people where you got it. it's not necessary but it's the only credit i get for doing things like this :)

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